In 2016, a string of graffiti depicting nazi symbols and racial slurs appeared on houses and places of worship in Ottawa. Anna Maranta’s Glebe home was one of them.

The Ottawa rabbi woke up in the middle of the night on a cold November Monday last year to find a red swastika and a derogatory term written boldly on her front door. When reporting the incident to the Ottawa Police, Maranta said she was asked if she thought it was a hate crime.

“I’m going ‘It’s a swastika and a derogatory term that’s specific to Semites … Why would you ask that question?’” Maranta recalled.

According to data compiled by Statistics Canada of hate crimes from police forces across the country, Jewish people are the most targeted religious group in Canada, accounting for 50 per cent of all hate crimes against religions in 2015.

That number has declined slightly in 2016, with hate crimes against jews accounting for 38 per cent, despite the total number of hate crimes going up. However, they continue to be the most targeted out of all the major religions.

Toronto Police Service’s annual hate crime statistical report for 2016 shows a similar trend, with Jewish people being victim to 30 per cent of all hate crimes in the city that year.

But Mark Freiman, a Toronto lawyer and former Deputy Attorney General of Ontario, said the statistics don’t tell the complete story. He attributes this to the way police handle hate crimes across the country.

“Those statistics can’t tell you anything because they are collected in an inconsistent way without a standard definition of what constitutes a hate crime,” Freiman said.

Some police forces consider crimes that are solely motivated by hate as a ‘hate crime,’ others only look for hate as one of the motivations, Freidman said. This causes confusion in the system, and therefore the numbers, he added.

“It all depends on reporting and police pursuing certain leads, and that depends on what the staffing is like,” he said. “You really have a lot of noise in those statistics and I’m not sure they tell you anything aside from general trends.”

For this reason, Freiman believes the number of hate crimes in Canada is actually higher than what the statistics show.

Maranta said she also believes the numbers aren’t accurate, because hate crimes against jews are more widely reported to police jurisdictions than those targeting other religions. She credits this to the several Jewish organizations in Canada that follow hate crimes and report them.

“I don’t actually think we’re the number one targeted right now. I think we’re probably almost on par with Islam, Islam is actually above,” Maranta said. She added Muslims, many of which are newcomers to Canada, are not as comfortable reporting hate crimes.

“I’m concerned that we don’t have really good statistics,” Maranta said.

Freiman said there is a long way to go before the numbers can start painting a more accurate picture.

One way to get more accurate numbers is to have police forces use a standard definition for hate crimes across the country, Freiman said, but no work has been done as of yet to fix the issue.

“We’ve never really been at home with the concept of hate crimes,” he said. “ … It’s certain that crimes motivated by hate are a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but how they’re going to be addressed is not very clear right now.”

Maranta’s case was reported as a hate crime to the Ottawa Police, but she said both police and the general public need to do a better job of understanding what a hate crime is before moving forward.

“We don’t really understand yet what hate is and what hate means, and why certain groups would consider something hurtful,” she said.